Narcissus (Broken Sleep Books), the fourth full collection of poems by Trinidadian Andre Bagoo, draws on Ancient Greek myth — specifically, the story of the beautiful doomed youth who becomes obsessed with his own image — to explore queerness and violence, and the entanglements between body and spirit, the human and the non-human. As concerned with the natural world as with art and music, these poems experiment with form, register, and voice, often hovering somewhere between desire and memory, fulfilment and disappointment.

Tropic Death (Simi Press), the acclaimed collection of short stories by Guyanese Eric Walrond, has been reissued nearly a century after its original publication in 1926. Born in Georgetown in 1898, Walrond migrated to New York City at the age of 19, and quickly entered the literary and intellectual circles of the Harlem Renaissance. Set in the Caribbean and Central America during the construction of the Panama Canal, these stories portray the lives of working-class men and women at the turn of the century. The cruelty and violence of colonial life and the nature’s obliviousness to human suffering are inescapable in these powerful works of short fiction.

Alexander Bedward, the Prophet of August Town: Race, Religion and Colonialism (University of the West Indies Press), by historian Dave St. Aubyn Gosse, is a study of a historical figure once considered a joke, now being recognised as an important Black nationalist thinker. The Jamaican Revivalist preacher Alexander Bedward, born in 1848, won an islandwide following for his teachings challenging racist colonial laws and conventions. He spent the last decade of his life in a mental asylum, but Gosse argues that the portrayal of Bedward as a comic eccentric was part of a deliberate colonial policy to suppress his influence and his ideas about Black self-sufficiency, which make him an important precursor to Marcus Garvey.

Black Man Listen: The Life of JR Ralph Casimir (Papillote Press), by Kathy Casimir MacLean, is a biography of Dominica’s leading Pan-African activist, written by his granddaughter. Born in 1898 and enjoying a lifespan of nearly a century, Casimir was a poet, journalist, editor, and teacher, as well as the general secretary of Dominica’s branch of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. A regular contributor to the UNIA newspaper Negro World, Casimir also served as a town councillor for Roseau, and was a key figure in early efforts towards Caribbean self-government and regional unity.